19/09/2016 - The Oslo-based fund will also support new features by Finnish director Aku Louhimies and Swedish filmmaker Carl Javer

The Nordisk Film & TV Fond has decided to chip in €430,000 for Danish director Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built, the eight-part English-language TV series that he will now shoot as a feature for Danish producer Louise Vesth, of Zentropa Entertainments. 

Von Trier, who most recently directed the award-winning Nymphomaniac 1 [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Louise Vesth
film profile] and 2 [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (2013), has himself written the script about an intelligent hired murderer, Jack, whom he follows over 12 years, introducing the murders and his development into a serial killer. The film is yet to be cast. 

The Oslo-based fund has also supported the third adaptation of Finnish author Väinö Linna’s 1954 novel The Unknown Soldier [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which will be premiered in December 2017, when Finland celebrates the 100th anniversary of its independence. It was previously also filmed in 1955 (by Edvin Laine) and 1985 (by Rauni Mollberg). Finnish director Aku Louhimies received €270,000 for this “story engraved in our national identity, which should not be forgotten”, as he said. Finnish producer Mikko Tenhunen will stage the €7 million epic for Louhimies’ new production company, Suomi 2017.

The fund also allocated a €60,000 subsidy to Swedish director Carl Javer’s Reconstructing Utøya, which looks back five years after the 22 July 2011 terrorist massacre in Oslo and on the island of Utøya, Norway, where Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people, also injuring several hundred, in the deadliest attack in Norway since World War II.

Produced by Sweden’s Vilda Bomben, with Norway’s Jab film and Denmark’s Made in Copenhagen, the €650,000 documentary describes how five survivors from Utøya remember the events, and how they themselves came out of the shooting alive, also through studio reconstructions.